These Sundays of Lent we have, one at a time, explored THE FIVE PRINCIPLES OF THE LIFE OF THE CHURCH laid out by David Anderson and Paul Hill in the book Frogs Without Legs Can’t Hear.

These five principles help us understand the dynamics of faith formation, and I pray you have learned something about how faith formation and faith nurturing take place in the life of the congregation, which includes the life of the home and household. I hope you have begun, if even in small way, to put into practice in your life and your home some of the Five Principles and the Four Keys that we have explored these weeks of Lent.

These five principles are not mutually exclusive but work together and overlap creating a climate and opportunity for faith to happen and for the Holy Spirit to move and work among us.

I have made the point that faith is not like filling a bucket.  Faith is not like pouring a bunch of information inside of someone’s head, and if enough information gets stuffed in, then out will pop something called faith.  That’s not it!   Faith is not like filling a bucket, but rather faith is like lighting a fire.   And for the fire of faith to be ignited in a human life, especially the life of children and youth, these five principles are meant to be employed in congregational and home life as well as the Four Key faith practices we have been exploring on Wednesday evenings.

I graduated from college in 1970. Prior to entering seminary from 1970–73, I was a full time staff member of my home church in Illinois in youth ministry. In those days there were few resources to consult to learn just what it was that I was supposed to be doing in youth ministry. There were not many full time church youth ministry staffers and nobody had a clue. The only real directive I got for what I was suppose to be doing was from the senior pastor and the church council. As I look back, what I received from them was both good news and bad news – I might even say "very good news" and "very bad news."

The good news first: This congregation had a magnificent physical plant. In 1970 they began to build the last phase of their building. The planning phase was timed perfectly with my arrival on the staff. Included in preliminary plans was provision for a "youth room." They rightly determined if we were going to have youth director we needed a "youth room." They even consulted me as to how the "youth room" should be done. I was only 22 years old, not too many years removed from being an adolescent myself, and I saw this as an opportunity. I thought "what the heck," I will present the most progressive and outer limit proposal for not just a youth room, but a for youth center the likes of which had never been proposed or seen in any congregation in that community. I figured all they could say was, "No! Are you nuts? Get real!"

To make a long story short, the good news was they actually built the thing! And not only did they build it they even built it more grandiose that my outrageous proposal! I thought it was a glorious accomplishment for a bunch of stuffy old Swedes, and I commend them for it.

The bad news: I was told, "OK, now you have your youth center. Do your thing." In so many words I was told that the youth ministry was my thing and not their thing. They saw the building of the youth center as the fulfillment of their responsibility to youth ministry, and they were absolved of any other responsibility. The message was, "Joe, youth ministry is your thing. Don’t ask the congregation for anything else, and don’t do anything off the wall that will cause, trouble, controversy or embarrassment."

At 22 I was delighted to be able to direct a youth ministry with little or no meddling on the part of the senior pastor, council or congregation. We could do our thing and nobody would know or care, as long as we live within the specified parameters.

But I look back on it now, and see what bad news that model and paradigm really was. Children and youth in that congregation were not welcome in worship. In fact, Sunday school and worship were concurrent: two worship services and two Sunday Schools, one during each service. Children literally grew up in that congregation and had near perfect Sunday school attendance and never once attended worship.

If you did attend worship with children, you were an aberration, and if the children were fussy the ushers were instructed to ask the family to leave.

With the exception of your Sunday school teacher there was no opportunity whatsoever for cross-generational interaction or relationship.

Children and youth ministry was strictly compartmentalized into unseen areas of the building and treated as peripheral to the life of the congregation, not an integral part of congregational life. Children and youth were effectively sequestered off into a corner, in our case a very elaborate corner, but a corner nevertheless. The whole system was designed for parents to drop their children off to get their little heads (buckets) filled with stuff and one hour later the parents would pick them up. The parents might have been in worship during that hour, but a significant number chose to go and worship at the corner donut shop. I am sure the donut shop owner was delighted. With the exception of a Sunday school teacher, for many children and youth there was no other adult involved in their life that was in any way modeling or mentoring Christian faith in the context of a meaningful relationship.

But you know what? My home congregation was not unique. The ultimate bad news is that’s what everybody was doing: that was the accepted paradigm and model of the time and up until very recently still the operative paradigm, and in many cases a paradigm that many congregations are still using in some form.

The Fifth Principle of the Life of the Church for the 21^st century says something very, very, very different: It Takes Christian Parents and Other Adults to Raise Christian Youth.

In the past four weeks on Sundays I have preached about four things, and I can summarize them in one compound sentence: "Since the fire of faith is ignited through personal, trusted cross-generational relationships(1), and since the church is a partnership between home and congregation(2), and since the home is the church extended into the community(3), and since faith is caught more, than taught(4), it follows that all Christian adults teach faith, values and character formation to children and youth(5)."

The old paradigm for youth ministry assumed that the congregation would delegate the faith formation of children and youth to a person: a heroic youth director, or perhaps be even a young pastor if the church had the financial means. Churches have historically viewed youth pastors as inexperienced and youth ministry as an opportunity to get a little experience until they finally "graduate" to "real" ministry in a few years.

But let’s face it. The old paradigm did not work very well. Anderson and Hill point out that in a study comparing six leading denominations, the ELCA had the highest level of youth participation up through 8^th grade. From 8^th-12^th grade, when comparing those same six denominations, the ELCA had the lowest level of participation. We go from the highest to the lowest in one year. The old paradigm does not work folks. It simply does not work.

But this new paradigm, one that we at Holy Love have been actually implementing little by little over the last few years, and are advancing in our Lenten emphasis, is actually even an older paradigm. In fact, it’s the oldest paradigm of all. It is a biblical paradigm and we hear it expressed in today’s Deuteronomy scripture, "Remember today that it is not your children (who have not known or seen the discipline of the Lord your God), but it is you who must acknowledge God’s greatness…"

The best youth ministers in this congregation are you! Yes you!

I want to say that I am so proud of so many of you. On this last Sunday of this Lenten series I want to thank so many of you who in the last couple of years around here have begun to incarnate these Five Principles of the Life of the Church and the Four Key faith practices.

I am proud of you twenty-five or so adults who are involved in our confirmation ministry. I am proud of you confirmation small group leaders who make yourself so beautifully vulnerable and available to a small group of youth, and you have a chance to allow your life to interact with theirs. I am proud of you presentation team members and all the other volunteers who give of yourselves and open your lives to our youth in our confirmation ministry.

I am proud of you 40 or so adults who are mentors. It is especially significant that so many of you either don’t have children or your children are grown up and are long gone, but you have been there relating one-on-one to a youth letting your lives intersect and be available to a young person. What you are doing is creating opportunities for the Holy Spirit’s to perform quiet miracles of faith ignition and nurture; providing an opportunity for your faith to be "caught" by another.

I am proud of you individuals, families, households and homes who have begun to make a more deliberate effort at implementing these Five Principles and Four Keys in your home and your extended domestic relationships.

I am proud of you church council members and other leaders who have affirmed this model and supported your staff who have worked hard to get us going in this new direction using this new paradigm. It is not easy and it will not happen over-night because we have a life-time of the old entrenched mind-set to overcome.

What this fifth principle of the life of the church is saying is consistent with the adage that goes, "It takes a village to raise a child." It takes a congregation to ignite faith in a young human life.

The old model and paradigm of ministry compartmentalized children and youth, and by implication turned them into second class citizens in the church. The new model says that compartmentalization doesn’t work, that faith is not merely taught in formal classrooms, but is "caught" and "ignited" in real, intentional cross generational relationships.

The old model delegated a few "professionals" and dedicated volunteers with the responsibility of the ministry of faith formation among our children and youth. The new model sees the professionals as those who empower and mobilize the whole congregation in faith formation.

The old model presumed that the "professional" would ideally be young and their service would be a stepping stone to a more authentic position of ministry later on. The new model says you are never too old, and in fact, the older you are the more you have to offer a youth or child in terms of your wisdom and mature faith. The new model says that faith igniting and nurturing ministries, especially with children and youth, are the core purpose and mission of the church.

In today’s gospel we see that the sheep only recognize the voice of the true shepherd, not an imposter or a phony.

The question for us is which voices are our children and youth heeding today. There are so many voices that bombard them, and shout at them, and lure them, and invite them, and tug at them; voices that make big promises: materialism, popularity, alcohol, drugs, sex, and a hundred others. Many of these voices preach what are ultimately destructive values, behaviors and beliefs.

In that noisy context the voice of a single pastor, or Sunday school teacher or lone-ranger youth director will be drown out and rarely heard in the challenges of daily life and in the midst of so many voices.

The sheep come to trust the voice of the one who feeds them, loves them, gives them time and attention on a regular basis.

If our children and young people are to hear the voice of Jesus Christ clearly and come to trust and follow his voice above all the other phony voices, it is going to take a community of caring, concerned, committed, intentional, mature Christian adults – a village – a congregation.

In conclusion to this Lenten series I leave you with this challenge:

This brings us full circle to where we started five weeks ago. Faith is ignited and nurtured in the context of personal, trusted relationships.

Jesus Christ is the fullest expression of God’s passion and desire to have a personal trusted relationship with each and every one of us. It is the most astounding, transforming good news in the universe. I pray that each of us would see ourselves, by virtue of faith, as commissioned to reach out to one another as Christ reaches out to us. Amen.